


I Wanna Build A Fort

by conceptstage



Series: Single Chapter Critical Role [16]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 03:58:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19310170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptstage/pseuds/conceptstage
Summary: Beau wants to build a fort.





	I Wanna Build A Fort

“Come help me,” Beau said, leaning over Caleb’s bed as he blinked his eyes opened tiredly.

He groaned and spent a few seconds to try and figure out what time it was, then he pressed the palm of his hand against her face and pushed her away. “ _ Verdammt _ , it’s six in the morning, why are you up?” It was always dark in Rosohna no matter the time of day, but he had discovered that there were other ways of figuring it out besides just going by the sun.

“I didn’t sleep.” She snatched his hand out of her face and held it up in the air, wiggling his arm obnoxiously. “Get up. Come help me.”

“Help you what?” Instead of answering, she dropped his arm and grabbed the sheet that he was laying on and tugged him fully out of the bed so that he crashed to the floor, landing on the soft rug instead of the hard, cold stone. “Beau!” he complained. He refused to call it a whine, but that’s exactly what it was. He sat up, his red-brown hair a frizzy mess around his pouting face. “What is going on?”

“Caleb, I’m freaking out and I just want your help with something.” She rolled her eyes and forced the next word out like she was pulling a tooth. “Pleeeaaase.”

He frowned and looked up at her closely for the first time since she’d woken him up. Her fingers were shaking and her eyes were rimmed red. “Beau?” he mumbled, using the bed to push himself up onto his feet so that he could look her in the eye. He never noticed before now that he was a couple inches taller than her. Usually when he cared to pay attention to things like that, he was slouched and she was standing tall, but when they both stood equally, he had probably three inches on her. “Are you alright?”

“Fine, yes, never better. Let’s go.” She turned sharply and started marching towards the door.

Caleb sighed and pulled on a shirt put didn’t bother with pants. Hopefully he’d be able to go back to sleep after whatever this was and putting on pants made his current wakefulness feel more official. He shuffled along behind her and she hissed at him to hurry, being careful not to wake anyone. Well, anyone else, because apparently Caleb didn’t get that courtesy. 

She lead him into the practice/workout/beau-kicking-the-stuffing-out-of-the-dummies-because-she’s-pissed room and when his eyes started to clear in the dim, flickering torch light, he realized that she had pushed all the fighting tool out of the way and up against the walls and there was a pile of wooden boxes in the center instead.

“Where did you get these?” he mumbled, feeling more awake now that there was apparently something interesting going on.

“Garbage.”

Caleb frowned at her. “You pulled this out of the garbage? Whose garbage?”

She rolled her eyes. “Relax, I made sure that they were clean. I told you that I haven’t been to sleep. I was feeling kind of anxious and…” she looked thoughtful like she wanted to pick her words properly. “...pent up. So I went for a walk around the neighborhood. One of the stores was-”

“Stores? There are no stores in the neighborhood, this is strictly residential.”

“Okay, so maybe I ventured a little bit out of the neighborhood, whatever.”

“You are a human in the Dynasty, you can just wander around by your-”

“Oh, get off it,” she teased. “I’m obviously fine. Anyway, one of the stores was throwing these out and I realized… I wanted to make a fort. So I carried them all back here and I went looking behind other stores to see if anyone else had any and I brought back whatever I could find and I want a fucking fort.”

Caleb frowned and looked back at the pile of boxes. It had obviously been stacked up at some point and had fallen over already. “And you want my help with what exactly? I’m not exactly a builder.”

“I’ll build, I wanted your help coming up with a way to make it stay. I’ve tried building it a couple times already but once I get about five feet high it falls over. I’ve tried gum but my jaw was getting tired and it didn’t work anyway. Short of raiding Nott’s alchemy supplies for tanglefoot bags, I can’t think of anything.”

“I think tanglefoot bags are a little over the top, you want to be able to take it down at some point. Tanglefoot is a little bit permanent.”

“Only if you’re a coward.”

Caleb frowned and blinked at her in confusion. “What does that even mean?” She just shrugged and he dropped it. He started walking around the pile with a critical eye, trying to come up with something. “We need a way to cut holes in the boxes. Small, tiny holes about the size of a thimble. Then we can tie them together.” 

Beau walked over to the rucksack leaning against the wall and pulled out a stiletto dagger. “Will this work?”

“A little overkill but it should work. We need some twine. You wouldn’t happen to have some of that in there, would you?”

“Cad has some up in the garden. I saw him tying up some herbs to dry in the kitchen. I’ll buy him some more.” She handed him the dagger by the handle and jogged out of the room, disappearing down the dark hallway.

Caleb kneeled down and started digging holes through the sides of the boxes, trying to make sure that they matched up well enough to be tied together. Beau was only gone for a few minutes and started wordlessly tying the boxes together, occasionally taking a step back to plan how she wanted a certain wall to look, and then giving him gentle instructions about how the holes should fit together but otherwise they worked in silence.

After a while, it started to look somewhat like a tiny house made of wooden bricks that were stamped on the sides with ‘Soap’ and ‘ Fragile: Glass’.

When Beau had tied the final box securely on top to finish off the roof, they could hear the others started to putter around the house. The quiet clanging of pots in the kitchen was probably Caduceus and the gentle murmur from down the hall sounded like Nott and Yeza.

Beau took a step away to look it over and seemed happy with the final product. She sighed, her shoulders relaxing for the first time all morning. She wasn’t shaking anymore and the red rims around her eyes were fading.

“Hey,” she said quietly. She was still speaking in low tones, so he figured that she didn’t want to alert the others to where they were or what they’d been doing just yet. “Thanks. I’m sorry I made you get up. My…” She sighed. “My thoughts got the fuck away from me a bit last night and I was spiralling. Every thought I had just lead to a worse thought and so on and whatever.”

“It is no trouble,” he said, looking the fort over. After a momentary pause, he spoke up again. “Maybe we shouldn’t go in that. It does not look very safe.”

“Yeah, that shit looks unsteady as fuck.” She playfully bumped his shoulder with her own. “Wanna go bother Cad for breakfast scraps before the others wake up?”

“Ja,” he turned and they walked one after another out the door, leaving the fort alone. They heard the crash as it fell from the kitchen a few minutes later and started to laugh.


End file.
